Trying to follow, much less get your head around, America’s ongoing culture wars, ridiculous partisanship, and all the bile spouted repeatedly by hypocritical politicians is like being at a Rappers Convention. It’s constant chaos.
In the middle of that rancid daily lunacy, we might be forgiven for missing a significant milestone: This week marks the 20th anniversary of the invasion of Iraq. Make that the second invasion.
In January 1991, during the presidency of George H. W. Bush, the U.S. went to war with Iraq to free the country of Kuwait (and all its oil), which Iraq had invaded and taken over in August, five months earlier. America had 33 allies in the venture including most Arab states. Iraq had no allies. Not one.
After American and British airpower destroyed more than 30% of the Iraqi military’s capability, the ground operation, Operation Desert Sabre, brilliantly planned and executed under the leadership of Gen. Norman Schwarzkopf, lasted all of 100 hours before Saddam Hussein was forced to accept a cease fire.
And that’s where it stopped. President Bush, General Schwarzkopf, and Chairman of the Joint Chiefs General Colin Powell decided not to continue on to Baghdad, which frustrated a lot of hawkish politicians.
It was the right decision. The war had been won, Kuwait freed, and Hussein humbled and forced to agree to international inspections to root out any weapons of mass destruction he might have stockpiled. Moving on to Baghdad would have mired the U.S. down in a protracted slog, and the Arab allies would never have agreed, anyway. For that matter, it’s likely none of our allies would have agreed.
The 1991 invasion showed American leadership at its finest. The 2003 invasion, the second invasion, showed it at its worst, and we’ve been paying for it ever since.
President George W. Bush’s 2003 invasion demonstrated in vivid colors what hubris can do to otherwise rational people. After 9/11, our job was to capture Osama bin Laden and destroy al Queda. Nearly every country in the world was on our side. Then came the stupidity of Iraq.
Claiming without a shred of verified evidence that Iraq had stockpiles of weapons of mass destruction, — it didn’t — the Administration invaded. Soon, we had taken over the country. We were the dog who caught the bus.
Tragically, Bush did not have his father’s wisdom (remember “Mission Accomplished?”), and he and his neocon associates believed they could conquer and rebuild Iraq in the image of America, just as Presidents Eisenhower, Kennedy, Johnson and Nixon had believed the same about Vietnam. All of these five presidents were catastrophically wrong.
Nearly three million U.S. soldiers deployed to Iraq and Afghanistan beginning in 2001. Twenty-five hundred are still in Iraq today. According to Brown University’s Watson Institute for International and Public Affairs, more than 7,000 of our troops had died there by the end of 2019. Thousands more were wounded, many of those maimed for life.
Just as so many Americans now have experience fighting, dying and being wounded in the Middle East, I have experience in Southeast Asia, where more than 50,000 of my brothers in arms died in a hostile place.
Thirty-five years after I landed in Saigon and got to participate in one of America’s worst mistakes — until then, — President Bush and his Neocons dropped us into another awful, no-win position. He and men with names like Cheney, Wolfowitz, Pearl, Kristol, et al, were blinded by the bright lights of “American exceptionalism.” Few, if any of them, had ever known a day of military service. They knew the right people and either had deferments, lots of them, or, like George Bush, were weekenders. Although it appears to have been fine for weekenders of Mr. Bush’s social and political status to skip those tiresome drills if they proved inconvenient.
A lifetime spent walking war’s sanitized sidelines, never hearing that unforgettable and very special sound a bullet makes as it whizzes past your ear, may prevent one from appreciating the chaotic hell of war and from grasping how terrifying it really ought to be to rip men and women from the fabric of their families to face the horrifying prospect of fighting and dying in a strange land for a counterfeit cause.
The Iraq war has been a national nightmare, but what I always found most horrifying about it was that once we were in it nobody, especially the egotists who tossed us into that deepest of pits, ever had any idea of how to get us out of it, which is exactly the same thing that happened to us in Vietnam. Vietnam, where lessons should have been learned, but weren’t. Instead, they were swept under the nation’s political rug for posterity to trip over. And it did.
In the pantheon of man-made catastrophes, our wars in Vietnam and Iraq have been monumental achievements.
Happy anniversary.
